Taxing week

Have I mentioned how much I hate doing taxes? Oh, I did? Ok, nothing to see here.

Apart from dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on paperwork, this week has been spent on fixing stuff in the story script engine. That seems to be done, now, so I’m starting to move on to other tasks. I’m still thinking of releasing a small app for writing Story Script modules in, but I’m not quite done testing it yet, but I’ll be playing around a little with it during the week, and if it seems solid, I’ll probably make it available for anyone who feels like beta testing it. Secondly, I’ve started working on the core Pirates and Traders 2 code itself.

Unfortunately, nothing that is worth taking screenshots of yet, but as soon as I have something, I’ll post them. Currently, I’m working on the Character Status view, which has a number of interesting issues. I’ve previously written about my intent to set up more “permanent” relations for the player; i.e., characters that you’ve interacted with a lot should “remember” you, but for that to work, there needs to be some very clear feedback mechanisms in place in-game. After all, it is not reasonable to expect that a player can remember that the Comte Domingo de Viamonte is really, really pissed at them – this information needs to be available easily. I’m still thinking on how to represent it in the story dialogues/scripts, but in the status window, my plan is currently to create a social map (i.e., sort of a wheel with the player in the middle, and the color of the spokes indicating the relationship between PC and NPC). I intend to build something similar for the in-game factions (as suggested by a couple of people for the game before).

Working on the status views will probably take the rest of the week (at least), but once that’s done the game should be closing in on “playable”.